Last month, I blogged about the difficulties I had with real estate sites on mobile devices. I closed off that post by writing:

“It would seem to me that real estate agents, the companies they work for, and their professional associations need to ensure they’re serving their potential customers using the devices they choose, not 9-year-old web browsers built for dialup. They’re missing out.

I’ve e-mailed the Canadian Real Estate Association and the Ottawa Real Estate Board to see if they can explain this a little bit to me. If they respond, I’ll update the post.”

Well, I finally have some news for you. Here’s what I asked the CREA:

I was wondering if you could provide some information to me about the
usability of the MLS residential real estate site on mobile devices
such as Blackberries and iPhones.

I recently tried to use MLS.ca on my Blackberry, and found I couldn’t.
Friends with iPhones were unable to use it either. It seems to me that
you would want people ot have immediate access to property information
on their mobile devices, and was a bit surprised to run into so much
trouble.

I was wondering:

* if the CREA or real estate agents recognize the growing importance
of mobile devices and the mobile Web.
* If so, are there plans at CREA to revise the web to make it usable
on mobile devices?
* If so, when would those revisions be completed?

After two e-mails to the Canadian Real Estate Association, I got this reply today:

“We are in the process of finalizing a mobile version of REALTOR.ca and we expect to launch during June 2009.”

That’s the whole reply, except for the signature block.

Here’s what I asked the Ottawa Real Estate Board:

I was wondering if you could provide some information to me about the usability of Ottawarealestate.org on mobile devices such as Blackberries and iPhones.

I recently tried to use MLS.ca on my Blackberry, and found I couldn’t. Friends with iPhones were unable to use it either. It seems to me that you would want people to have immediate access to property information on their mobile devices, and was a bit surprised to run into so much trouble.

I was also surprised to see your FAQs listing support only for Internet Explorer 5.5+, Netscape 6.1+, and Opera 7.5. Those standards are quite old; Netscape is no longer a player in the browser market, and your site doesn’t support Firefox, which holds more than 20% of
the browser market.

I was wondering:

* if the board recognizes the growing importance of mobile devices and the mobile Web.
* If so, are there plans to revise the site to make it usable on mobile devices?
* If so, when would those revisions be completed?

I’m writing about this for my blog Flacklife, a public relations and communications blog.

After 10 days, I wrote the OREB and asked if I would be getting a reply. They gave me this:

Thank you for your email.

OREB is currently investigating the delivery of content to mobile devices
as well as the business case for doing so.

Thx.

Not exactly fonts of information. Maybe mobile isn’t all the real estate business doesn’t get. What do you think of their responses? Should I have done something differently?

Ciao,
Bob.

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